Fallout: Horse Country

"No-one sucks the life from my penguins except ME... and maybe polar bears, because that's just nature, Gunter."

I found myself staring at a wall. It was grey. Very grey. I don't know why I was staring at that exact spot, but, for some reason, it captivated me. Greeeeeey... I have no clue how long I had been here, but I sure didn't have any complaints.

After hearing an enormous shout, and being smashed to that oddly fascinating wall, I became fully aware of the fact that Velvet Rambo was attempting to get my attention.

I threw up in my mouth. "Why... are you here?" I asked, with a relatively nonplussed expression, swallowing the involuntary emission.

She responded in the unusual deep-but-oddly-high voice to which I had become accustomed, although I could never stand being in her vicinity — don't get me wrong, she was certainly attractive physically, though relatively muscular, but there is nooo way I'd ever allow that to happen if she had that voice. "Hi, Ole Pipey. How's it going?" she asked, fluttering her eyelids.

"Don't give me that... please. What do you want from me?"

She crossed one foreleg over the other and let out a horrendous giggle. "Oh, me? Nooothing," she said with a blatant inflection.

"Then stop wasting my time." I turned to leave, but she body-slammed me into the ground.

"WHY WON'T YOU LOOOOVE MEEEE?!"

"Because you're HORRIBLE!" I told her, wriggling to try to get out from underneath her strong frame. Yeah, I wasn't very strong at all. "Let me go!"

"NO!"

"Fine then! Just tell me what you want, please!"

She rolled her eyes, then laughed quietly. "Oh, nothing... I just need my PipeBuck fixed," she finally stated, accidentally hitting me in the face with a golden GPS. "Oops, sorry."

"Jeez, can you please not do that?" I requested, accepting the GPS. "I'll have this back to you by this time tomorrow. Don't disturb me. I don't think I need to say 'please' again."

"Okay, thanks, Ole Pipey."

She was finally gone. Now I had some time to think.

* * *

Three hours later, I sat at my workbench at home (after having a mental round of Extreme Wrestling with my mother, in which I choked her out by accident), examining the shimmering PipeBuck. I wondered why she would so suddenly approach me like that (aside from her obvious crush — and I mean that word in both respects). The device appeared to be in perfect condition. I mean, there was no password on anything, so I could have checked out some of the songs she was working on, even if there was no way I would subject myself to that. Otherwise, it didn't look like it had been damaged in any way.

For what was she wasting my time with this? Was she just a fucking idiot and thought it needed to be repaired? Was she just trying to piss me off? Maybe I should just stow it away somewhere just to fuck with her...

My train of thought was rudely interrupted by a violent rapping of hooves at my front door.

"Little Pipe! We know you're the one who did it!" I heard two voices say from outside the door.

"Me? Did what?" I asked, immediately wondering if Rambo had something to do with this.

"You made her run away!" Who? "Our precious Velvet Rambo!"

Thought so. "Well then, go find her!" I told them, because that's how badass I am.

"She's not in the Stable! She went outside! It's your obligation to find her now!" they shouted.

In the time I took to formulate a response, I also considered the fact that there would no longer be an enormous muscly monster mare chasing me everywhere in this place anymore. Life would certainly be a hell of a lot more pleasant.

Then again, a lot of ponies here think that listening to her music is rather entertaining — I'd rather kill myself, though — so they'd probably pester me more than anyone. Hey, wait a minute...

"How did you know I was the one repairing her GPS?"

"..." they said. I heard some quiet muttering from outside the door. "She told us before she left!"

"Oh? Why would she do that?"

"..." they responded firmly. "Because she has a massive crush on you, and wanted you to know if something happened to her!"

Ugh... of course. "Fine! I'll go and look for her outside!" Jeez, why did she have to be such a pain all the time? But... hang on.

"Why would she want me, specifically, to rescue her? Doesn't she know that I have no muscle strength whatsoever?"

"Please! For the love of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, help her!" they begged, misanthropically.

This was getting really hard to deal with. I sighed, accepting my fate. I didn't have a choice. If I didn't do this, Rambo fans would make my life a living hell — even moreso than Rambo herself, which was indescribably frightening — even though she was the one who gave me the damn thing. That fucking bitch, why? Why?

"Piss off; I'll find her already!" I told them, slamming my head on the solid oak of the bench. I had always thought that was weird, considering that everything else here was made of metal, but the bench had always been this way.

"Yeah, you'd better!" Their hoofsteps disappeared into the distance.

Rambo body-slamming me, going missing, and now I had to go outside? Could this just be the worst day of my life?

* * *

An undefined amount of time later, I lay in my bed, looking over towards the soft bar of light which always came into my room under the door to see if any more Rambo fans were coming. I was also trying to figure out how the hell I was supposed to get out. We all know that the Overmare locked the keys out over 200 years ago. It should be impossible, and even if we did get out, we would just die right there; we would step out and be turned to dust, whisked away into nothingness.

Maybe Rambo had some sort of clue on her PipeBuck. I started browsing through the files she had apparently figured out how to put on it, scanning for key words. I couldn't find anything! What was the deal with this stupid mare? She didn't even organize different types of files into separate folders! A moment later, I had a stroke of brilliance. Maybe she has 'show hidden folders' turned off...!

Voila! A lone folder appeared on her desktop — why these hoof-sized things use Windows, I'll never figure out — called 'Hidden'. I opened it, only to be greeted with an empty screen, apart from two folders, 'DO NOT OPEN' and 'Hidden 2'. They were both hidden folders. That first folder looked suspicious. I double-clicked on it. It was full of JPEGs and—

"NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE! NOOOOPE!"

Okay, let's try the other folder. In 'C:\Users\Rambo\Desktop\Hidden\Hidden 2\', I found yet another blank screen, with a single folder: 'Hidden 3'. Oh, come on. Don't ponies know that doesn't add security at all?

I followed the seemingly endless tree of hidden folders, one after the other, until I reached the 99th. Inside, there were lots of folders.

Great.

Well, since the folder for which I was searching was the 100th, logically, I should try the folder labeled 'Hidden 100'. Empty. Of course. All of the numbers were in binary. Time to refer to my knowledge of Base 2!

100 = 64 + 36 = 2^6 + 36.

36 = 32 + 4 = 2^5 + 4

4 = 2^2

10^6 + 10^5 + 10^2 = 1100100

Found it! 'Hidden 1100100' contained a single WAV file, called 'Password.wav'. Damn you, Rambo. 100 damn folders. You have to waste my time even when you're not here! Anyway, I opened the file.

"The override code for opening to door of Stable 2 is... WTF696969GTFO."

What. The fuck?

Okay. Fine. I'm going right now.

* * *

I stood at the Stable 2 door. It took me while to get there, as there were guards everywhere. In most cases, I was able to seduce them with my unicorny charms — causing most of them to collapse and break down into laughter from sheer hotness — but I was forced to stab and kill a couple of them. They won't be missed. Anyway, I looked around for a control panel. Logically, for a door this large, it would likely be in a control room off to the side somewhere.

I found a control room off to the side somewhere. Inside it, there was a control panel with a giant input panel with a jumbo-sized QWERTY keyboard for use with hooves. I inputted the passcode, 'WTF696969GTFO', and it flashed a dialog box asking "Are you sure you want to activate the Stable 2 door?" with the options 'Yes' and 'No'. Obviously, I selected 'Yes'.

As soon as it processed my input, the ground started shaking, creating an incredibly loud rumbling and almost causing my legs to buckle under me. Each time one of the seven massive steel pins realigned out of the path of the door for when it opened, it made a huge 'clang', bouncing back and forth slightly. On the seventh pin, the massive steel portal cracked open.

"Outside..."

Suddenly, I heard a message adressed to one 'Little Pipe' over the PA system, in what sounded like a poorly imitated 'fancy' accent: "Little Pipe, you know you have to do this, so good luck! Go get her, sistah! I am the Overmare."

For God's sake, why did you have to say it like that? Before exiting, I briefly thought about supplies, and whether or not I had what I would need. I had plenty of bottles of water, a couple of fried chickens and an A3 hard-cover book — The Basics of Zermelo-Fraenkel Axiomatic Set Theory — to keep me entertained out there. I quickly rushed out the now-hanging-open Stable door to avoid any further conversation with these morons.

Outside that door, I realised I wasn't yet in Hell, and I wasn't really 'alive', either. There was a chain of sets of two metal braces of similar description, each holding one end of a long, purple-and-white-striped plactic pole. A limbo challenge, eh?

I approached the first one at 6', crouching slightly. No challenge. I passed it easily enough.

On approaching the second, at 4'6", I realised I might have had to bend my knees a bit to pass. Maybe my saddlebags could accidentally knock the pole off. I passed it fairly easily.

The third, though, was only half as high as the first, at 3', it may have been near impossible. I flattened myself against the ground, first sliding my saddlebags under to avoid being disqualified. This was when I noticed all of the previous contestants' skeletons piled up everywhere. Some of them appeared to have been holding wrappers for various confectionery products — but they had long ago dropped them onto the massive piles of similar objects on the ground to collect dust. What a waste. It was almost like landfill in here. A wasteland. Anyway, after getting my saddlebags through, I made it under, barely succeeding.

"Woohoo! What do I win?" On hearing no-one responding, I suddenly gained a sense of solitude — something I had never really experienced in Stable 2. "Wow... this is so relaxing. I should have come out here earlier."

I saw an old, rickety staircase leading up to a small garage. The door was just regular-sized, like the doors in houses that I saw in history books. In the books, they called this type of door: a 'door'. I entered to find that it was in fact an exit door. The second link between life and death. I was outside.

Footnote: Level Up!

New Perk: Church Buster!  —  +10% damage to all religious targets.